An enterprise, not a startup, with enterprise mentality, but you'll learn a lot
Pros
(Tech review) Gamesys is a great place to find your feet in the gaming industry or in general at a tech company. At Gamesys we do own tech, so it's a good place to get involved and learn about all the intricacies of a complex system - backend servers and software, social networks, frontend graphics, etc. If you are passionate yourself, about learning and improving, you'll probably go far here (but see notes below for warnings) and it's an ideal place if you're just starting out (e.g. graduate). There are opportunities to work in a number of different disciplines and change teams. The technology whilst not really being mindblowing will give you a solid CV. The staff are by and large friendly. There is a good social atmosphere (if you like that sort of thing), with regular ad hoc pub visits in their local which they practically own these days, and internal drinks / disco etc. if people don't like going to pubs, where everyone can socialise within the building. There are team building events, and company building events... and the CEO does a great job at fostering a togetherness and a drive. There are wide and varied languages in use, so you'll get exposure to a lot - check the website for their current techstack, but they're essentially hot on javascript lua and java - you probably wont get to use anything else unless you're in a specialist team, but as mentioned transfer is fairly easy and common. There is a good sense of comradery within teams.
Cons
Agile: Gamesys is one of those semi-agile places, where everyone strives for the concepts, but never fully achieves them, because (unlike the grassroots techies here) the business fundamentally doesn't understand agile. To their credit they've given it a go, but they don't get how they'd need to change business processes to accomodate it. There's been rebranding of PMs as Scrummasters, PMOs be established, people constantly shifting in (and out) of management roles, as the business try to get a handle on what works. It's been more stable recently however, so maybe they've figured they've done it. So expect iterations/sprints here, but dont expect to release every day, or even every iteration. Expect standups, but dont expect the business to attend them. Expect short items of work for tech, but arbitrary deadlines from marketing which actually dont matter that much, but they must be met. Expect the team to require knowledge from the business on how/what to do something, but expect there to be "buffer" people whose responsibility it is to find that information out for the team, rather than being directly connected to them. Expect burndown charts, and teams which can self-monitor and self-improve but expect to log all your time in a company monitoring system too so upper management can feel like they know whats going on. Expect retrospectives and regular feedback within the team, but expect to be rewarded at the end of the year in a completely arbitrary way by a board of people you've never met making a judgment about you. There is no pan-company joined up workflow. Startup vs Enterprise: If you've got some great ideas yourself about using this or that framework, dont expect a speedy transition even if you're "correct" - in fairness they've been burnt a lot of times by new tech going wrong, or not having the right levels of knowledge to run it, and are wary of new tech and new ideas, but it is possible to progress at a snails pace. For example, they've only just adoped git over svn which is a nobrainer, but has taken them to now to do it. The slowness is probably by design- helping with their stability as a platform which must not go wrong at all costs, and the fact they have hundreds upon hundreds of members of staff, and so quickly steering all those staff is nigh on impossible... but if you're someone keen to implement something you know which has a great benefit , your overriding feeling with be one of frustration and you have to be patient to the tune of years. The best I've seen is you may get lucky and might get asked to prove your idea and the benefits... they aren't averse to good ideas. Gamesys love spending money on enterprise products when they have some great talent who could easily engineer their own solutions with open source tools available. Upper management at Gamesys suffer from that classic chronic ailment that they believe if they double the number of staff they'll get double the amount of work. For their platform you'll be staggered at how many devs and operations staff there are. Ultimately my advice is, if you're a passionate tech: come here and spend a couple of years to pick up all the skills you need and then shift off to a place where you can really drive something... if you're a coaster tech: come here and just stick around. Ultimately it's a good place, worth a punt, but I'd wager you after 2 years you'll be frustrated. Which in the tech industry isn't that bad!
